Here’s the guide I used: https://www.standingpad.org/posts/2024/06/affinity-on-linux/

The only thing I did differently was I used this yaml to make the container: https://gist.github.com/gnat/8b69cf49b68e2349afe5e8cb5af49bf8

There’s a bit of tinkering afterwards, but it runs.

Pretty stable from my testing, outside of a few crashes when I was asking too much of it.

That said Inkscape/gimp/kirta are good alternatives if you are in the market.

While it’s a pain to setup, Affinity does work in Bottles and a specific build of Wine. Not easy to do, but it’s possible.

Only if you live in the US or UK. Lol I didn’t realize Amazon’s international kneecapping of their products moved to include hardware along with software.

For context if you are Canadian you don’t get access to overdrive or audiobooks on Kindle. Fun fact this also includes their fire tablets.

Because printing in Linux both works and is supported and not supported and hope that there are drivers and they work.

For example, I have a brother printer and in both arch and Ubuntu/mint the printer worked out of the box. But I was missing features like double sided printing. So I had to download drivers for it.

In arch the drivers were on the AUR, so I was printing is seconds.

In Ubuntu/mint they weren’t in my package manager, so I had to go to brother’s website and hope they had drivers. Brother did and while it took a bit it did work too. No worse than windows.

They

Can’t remember any more, either it was installed along side another package, or it was installed because of intel openCL support. Either way it’s been over a year since my last Manjaro install borked, and I’ve been running (and upgraded) Linux Mint.

For me it was installing apps from the AUR, like Intel Compute. Had dependency issues and errors every time other packages updated and when I tried to fix it, other modules would uninstall, and break my DE, or put my machine in an unrecoverable state.

It’s not as bad as that time my btfs file system broke randomly in Fedora, since I was able to recover my data. But it always felt like an endless battle with the distro to keep it going. Which is why I moved to mint.

I know it was a Manjaro issue since when I attempted to move to EndevorOS the issues were gone… though I dont like it as a distro (I.e. why isn’t a package manager gui installed by default)

Manjaro, its a clean and simple way to install Arch with lots of good GUI for all the tasks a user needs to do on their system… Then it crash and bricked the install… 3 times.

Anyways I’m on Mint now.

Depends on the distro.

I found Linux Mint good enough for 99% of things, and most problems can be solved without a terminal.

Problem is you’d still need to know enough about Linux (just like with windows) to troubleshoot. For example, the files app was causing an error when plugging in drives, I need to figure out that the files app wasn’t call files, but nemo, it’s config lived in a hidden folder called .config in my home folder, and in .config I could delete my configuration to fix my issue.

In my view Linux is about Windows XP or 7 in terms of usability, a bit of a learning curve, but one worth learning.

A few modern improvements which makes using Linux easier.

Use Flatpaks where possible, it’s platform agnostic and usually supported by the actual devs.

AppImages (think portable exe for windows), are another option, but to “install” them you’d need an app called Gear Lever.

Check with an apps developer before installing, flatpaks can be packaged by anyone, and they might loose support (steam for example is installable via Deb not flatpak).

I wouldn’t worry too much about not knowing this. The steam deck is still relatively new and proton/dxvk is improving at such a blinding pace compared to the rest of Linux that my head is still spinning.

From my limited understanding, because of Arch’s rolling releases and Valve basing the steam deck on Arch. DXVK the compatibility layer for DX games to vulkan is managed by the distro. How this works is magic is still magic to me. I also think graphic drivers gets pushed on arch early too, since it’s a rolling release.

However I am in complete agreement, Arch isn’t beginner friendly, I personally like Manjaro and find it friendlier, but that’s like having a pet cat, and it’s a Bob cat. Sure it’s not a Lion, but it’s not a Kitty.

Have you not heard of the Steam Deck and Proton? Running MS APIs through a compatibility layer is the main goal for Linux gaming for the past few years, as it allows legacy games that had no hope in getting a Linux native port (or a terrible Linux port) to run in Linux, through the Proton Compatibility layer.

The apps I was using were running with DXVK, but due to a bug with intel iGPU driver which affects both Windows and Linux users, it didn’t work. A Intel Mesa update patched the bug, and my game worked better. When I moved back I was on an older driver and had to wait for it to be added in.

This comes from personal testing of games. There was a DX11 bug intel igpus where UE4 games crash instantly on boot. I was able to work around this by forcing dx12 in arch, but when I moved to fedora it wasn’t working, that was until about 2 months later after an update. Since I don’t know exactly how far behind fedora is in terms of graphics drivers I said it in ambiguous terms.

From my personal experience Arch is several months ahead of other distros and depending on the package and sometimes has everything you need already included for gaming.

I believe this is due to the Steam Deck.

However for ease of use, I agree there are other better distros. Fedora is only 2ish months behind arch in terms of graphics drivers and Ubuntu… has the latest proton from steam and lutris since proton isn’t installed from the local app stores.

I was more going for ease of use. If you are playing the latest and greatest then I agree you’d probably want Arch based or at the minimum Fedora based distributions. However if you are playing some more stable games, or I do titles and Ubuntu is fine. The updates will come.

My SO enjoys Zorin. Based on Ubuntu (like pop os) but had built in themes that makes the desktop environment easily customizable.

They found it easy to use and set up.

Many reasons. Many of which is down to how Google as a company is reaching between the proverbial couch cushions to get at the loose change to make a profit. Default opt-in tracking, breaking ad-blockers, and probably more which I forgot about since I abandoned Chrome years ago.

I’ve tried Linux on my Surface Go. It was awful but not in the way you’d think it would be.

Pros: Honestly Linux made the anemic processor on it feel snappy again. I couldn’t play the newest games, linux is not a miracle worker. But compared to the bloated experience its better than Windows 10.

Cons: The smallest features didn’t work. SD reader never worked. Needed the Surface firmware to get the webcam to work and even then it was worse than it was on Windows. No good on screen keyboard software, and from my testing no DE had a good tablet mode.

Plus the giant red “unsecured” bar on boot was an eye sore.

I know Linux is has more compatibility on different Surface models so maybe it was just my Go. Or perhaps it was Manjaro. Either way if you don’t have a machine yet maybe look at other laptop/tablets

Is it the Dacia Sandero?

From my quick search you aren’t getting everything from under $150.

I got a USB C dock from Amazon under the name LASUNEY, but it’s not for sale any more. I’ve seen equivalent under a 15 in 1 naming that seems to exactly the same, just under a different name LIONWEI that’s around the $100 mark, 2 DP 1Gbps and many usb ports.

I believe resolution is determined by your machine’s chipset not the dock, but I could be mistaken.

Now I also found one that has 2.5Gbps networking but that’s $270 under the Plugable brand. Not a fan of the specs of that one since the power comes from a barrel Jack instead of usb c.